Successful women entrepreneurs say the business community in the country should change their opinion towards them, reports Arshad KhanThe urgency to elevate participation of women entrepreneurs in the national business ecosystem was met with wise suggestions by the Y-gen women entrepreneurs at the Young Entrepreneurs Award event hosted by BW|Businessworld. The face of successful women entrepreneurs agreed that the business community in the country should change their opinion towards them and the failure of a start-up has nothing to do with the gender of its founders. Anshulika Dubey of Wishberry says, “six months back when we raised Rs 4 crore, many people said that we overvalued ourselves. This thing wouldn’t have been said if our company would have founded by all men league.” Further she adds that she doesn’t take investors on board whose opinions vary for female entrepreneurs. On discussing with the most common phenomena of quitting job after reaching to a certain age category to don the role of a family caretaker, the panel urged the women section not keep their dreams at bay and give equal importance to their professional life. Upasana Taku, co-founder, MobiKwik preferred a rather different view and said that women levels themselves below par combined with fear of a failure. This makes them to lose confidence in other women too. Women are the largest unused resource of the country and they ambition should not be crushed by social conditioning.” A country like India where half of the of the population lies below 30, there is huge opportunity for young women entrepreneur to prove their mettle in the business ecosystem. Example such as Indira Nooyi and Arundhati Bhattacharya have already paved a way for them to look into them and follow the path which they want to choose.
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Ajay Batra I believe that “Startup” is a broad term that is used far too generously. In reality there are four nuances of this term, each denoting a specific stage of maturity of the entrepreneur and his/her organization. In reality, a Startup is mapped to one of these 4 nomenclatures: IDEA: An idea is not a startup. An idea of a startup is also not a startup. It is just what is – a thought. Sometimes the idea pertains to a feature (e.g. add voice search on corporate websites), solution (e.g. increase efficiency of petrol cars) or just passion in a broad area (e.g. school education). It is common to have many ideas – especially if the would-be-entrepreneur has a curious bent of mind and is comfortable asking “why not” questions. Unfortunately, in the world of startups, ideas in of themselves carry very little currency. Ideas are great only when they become useful. Although the entrepreneurial journey begins with an idea, we must understand it’s just one of the steps in the overall process.Many entrepreneurs convince themselves that they have the next “billion dollar” idea, without understanding that it is the realization of the idea that generates its value. The billion dollar idea, if appropriate, if well planned and executed, may well become a 100 Billion business.Eureka moments to change the world are great. But they have to be nurtured and morphed into something else. An entrepreneur is not only an idea generator, he or she has to be the executor of the idea. To proceed to the next stage, an entrepreneur has to ensure that the ideas is aligned with the entrepreneur’s passion, and he/she is happy to make its pursuit the purpose of his life. Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. -Sue Grafton EARLY STARTUP: If the entrepreneur/founding team engage with the idea for a sustained period of time, and wish to take it forward – they will adorn the identity of an “Early Startup”. These entities have an abundance of positive energy emanating from the belief in their idea. There is clear evidence of excitement and willingness to learn / unlearn. The focus of the team at this stage is to visualize how their idea could be converted into a solution (product or service), and to validate that their idea has potential. This entails identifying who could potentially benefit from their solution (potential customers), what pain will the solution address, what comforts will the solution provide – and is there anyone else who may already have implemented all or part of the idea. All this is accomplished by real conversations and experience-sharing with potential customers or users - with a fair amount of iteration. There is a clear focus on thinking “outside-in” and developing a robust business model for the idea. Often, coloured by their passion or egos, or both, founders convince themselves of the usefulness of their idea – without any real interactions with the real world. Having dispassionate and experienced mentors at this stage becomes critical for ensuring objectivity of observation and analysis. The one thing that founders must avoid during the process is the - “solution looking for a problem” syndrome. To proceed to the next stage, the entrepreneur has to have discovered the exact markets/market segments his idea/solution addresses, and how these customer segments are to be reached, and how the idea with morph into a viable business. VALIDATED STARTUP: Possibly after multiple iterations in the previous stage, the founders have discovered how their proposed solution sits in the world of potential users and customers. They also have a tentative idea of how the startup will make money. So far, the founding team has not had the need to actually work on creating their product/service solution. That changes now. The knowledge gained in the previous stage is critical in developing a prototype of the proposed solution. The degree of functionality in this prototype will vary, e.g. quick wireframe of a proposed portal is much easier to make than a prototype of the new artificial limb. Hopefully, the founders will select an appropriate development methodology (e.g. rapid prototyping for software development) and will soon be able to have something that “feels and looks” like the final product. The prototype is shared with a select group of “representative” customers for their feedback on its functionality, physical attributes, accessibility and usefulness. Additionally, the team should inquire about the possible costs that the customer will bear for the solution [both one-time and repeat – if applicable]. These informative sessions are used as a feedback loops to continually refine their solution and the business model. Lest it conveys otherwise, the purpose of engaging with customers at this stage it not just to understand how much they “like” the product, but also to make some sales. Intense focus on adding the right features on the product, learning from the customers and convincing at least some of them to pay for it – makes this stage one of the toughest ones in the journey. This stage is also marked by encounters with nay-sayers; hence the founders need that extra dose of self-belief and perseverance in them. One common pitfall to avoid is to not spend extraordinary large amounts of effort and money in making the product/service so feature rich that it ends up overwhelming the customers, or makes the product unaffordable. To exit this stage, the startup must have a fairly well-defined solution that is being used by some paying customers – within the context of a working business model. You’ve invented something new but if you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business – no matter how good the product is. - Peter Thiel HIGH-GROWTH STARTUP: With market validation of not just the idea / product – but the business model – the startups is ready for enhancing its presence in the marketplace. This stage is characterized by: further refinements in the product /service solution, intense marketing and brand promotion, increased focus on sales and building the organization that will deliver the high-quality products/services to customers continuously. The founders have a tight balancing act to play: they must ensure that new customers are being acquired, existing customers are being provided excellent experience, bringing-in new team members for specialized roles and “letting-go” of certain decision-making responsibilities. This phase is challenging for many founders from work-life balance and operational perspectives (e.g. many founders don’t like marketing/sales/managing people – but this stage requires them to all of these, and more). The next stage truly takes the entity out of the startup universe. It is ready to become a “Scalable Organization” that has built reliable systems for planning, execution, talent management and product innovation. If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out alright. - Jeff Bezos
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Manish Kumar Pathak reports on the value that the start-ups are adding to travel segmentThe travel industry is undergoing a sea-change. The new age start-ups have popped up and are re-defining the concept of planning a travel, and in many ways the travel industry. The role of these travel start-ups, and their focus on specific areas like women-only travel sites or a student-focused hostel kind of hotel chains is very interesting, and the bearing they will have on this sector was the focal point of discussion during a session that took place at the E-tailing and Travel Commerce Conference 2015. The session was moderated by Anshul Srivastava, Head Sales & Marketing, Arzoo.com, and he observed that travelling is experiential process, and that unlike previously where travelling was a more a family oriented event, people are now very keen to travel in small groups and in many cases solo. Also, what value these start-ups are adding to this segment? Piya Bose, who is the founder of Girls on the Go Club, which is women-centric group, said that when she had started her journey she was very sceptical of the idea, but in these eight years the tremendous response that she has received has changed her perception completely. She said, “These 7-8 years have been a complete revelation, and now women are themselves coming out and challenging me to give them opportunities to travel. They have the means, and travelling is not just a voyage for them but they see it is as means of empowerment. The very feeling of having organised their own tickets or dealing in foreign exchange seems to thrill them, and they want to challenge their own limits. The trend is huge, and it is only on the increase.” Speaking on the issue of bag-packers, and how the trends are changing in India, where earlier travelling was a more planned affair, Akhil Malik, Co-Founder, Zostel observed that when he started experimenting with this concept, they were not entirely sure of the results. However, the response that they received was tremendous and that financially also the model was a viable one. Malik opined, “Earlier majority of our customers (bag-packers), were foreigners (90 per cent), but in the last two-years, there has been a shift of around 65 per cent foreigners and 35 per cent Indians. So, there is a change, and youngsters who are young corporates, or just outgoing youngsters, whose idea of travelling is not staying in a hotel, but to go out and witness the landscapes, taste the cuisines, talk to other travellers and just enjoy their stay in a very different way.” On the issue of value-addition provided to the travellers, Gautam Shewakramani, Founder & CEO, AudioCompass said that they come in when there is a need to replicate the presence of a physical guidance. “We virtually hold your hands and show you around. The problem that people face from our area, is that once you leave the hotel, you do not know which place to go, what to see. Here we step in, as we provide high quality content to the people and safe information about places. Since, many people travel because of site-seeing, we come in and give them this information.” Ish Jindal, Co-founder, Padhaaro, said that his company provides assistance during the period when people actually travel. “People want to visit local places, taste local-cuisines etc., and we then step in. We allocate personal local guides who provide assistance to them.” Chitra Gurnani, Co-founder, Thrillophilia Adventure Tours, says that often when people arrive at a destination they seldom have any plans on what to do next, and this because they are not aware of the things they can do at that place. “We are that bridging gap, and we believe travelling is no more just site-seeing, but more activity based. Hence we have introduced an app called near & far which will empower the people to acquire information about the interesting things to do at a particular place.” Speaking on the role of typical travel agents, Akhil Malik observed that they have to innovate to stay relevant. Piya Bose claimed that the future is bright only when travel agents become more of an ally rather than a middleman.
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GrownOut’s software combs through candidates to compile a list of those best suited to a particular organisation, reports Simar SinghHuman Resource professionals are always on the lookout for novel ways to simplify and expedite hiring processes, while ensuring that they rope in the right person for the job. GrownOut is an integrated solution providing software as a service company which seeks to assist companies through an analysis of behaviour, using various parameters based on pre-existing commonalities to provide clients right pool of potential employees that best suit their profile. “Job boards and career sites only cater to active candidates, a segment which forms a mere 15% of the total working professionals. Moreover, this 15% may not be the right talent for a particular job profile”, says Sumit Gupta who co-founded the Gurgaon based start-up in January last year and serves as its CEO. To tackle this problem and provide hiring solutions to HR managers, the cloud based tech-company, operating on a B2B model, focuses on the recognition of a relevant talent pool, and facilitating trustworthy warm introductions and communication through a system of social referrals.“All the information needed for sourcing is today available but it is important to know, who will be suitable to your organisation and also how to contact them to make sure the talent is motivated to join your organisation,” says Gupta. GrownOut’s software combs through candidates to compile a list of those best suited to a particular organisation. This process is based on selecting people from the same college that existing employees are form, those who have worked with existing employees in their previous workplaces or those who have attended events like conferences and seminars with them. These parameters, according to Gupta, are what help create an exhaustive talent pool, from which the best match can be hired. Integral to GrownOut’s hiring solution are warm introductions through social referrals. “Cold calls in the form of calls or mails from consultants and HR personnel have all lead to spamming and a general lack of faith in communication. The best way to contact a prospective employee is if a friend asks him to join the company”, says Gupta. GrownOut uses cloud technology to gather and analyse data related to the behaviour of both the job seeker and the recruiter and ultimately simplifies the hiring procedure. According to Gupta, this helps in establishing job switching behaviour to recognise which candidate is ready to switch, ensuring that the candidate is equipped with the right skills and will culturally fit into an organization, helping HR departments to map out a clear and distinct job profiles. The company received funding from Outbox Ventures and Matrix Partners in a Series A round of funding last October, currently has 20 employees and estimates that the numbers will swell to 50 by the end of this year. Currently around 125 companies are signed up for its freemium service. This includes the likes of Ola, Quikr, Appiterate, Stayzilla and Winshuttle. And, According to Gupta, clients are quickly moving on to the premium version. “In last one year the company’s only focus was to create the right product to fit the market and we have managed to do that- creating a next-gen referral hiring solution, a concept that is globally unique. All our funds have been dedicated towards this end and we are now concentrating on client acquisition”, says the company which is currently aggressively pursuing clients in the Delhi-NCR market and soon plans to expand to other metros.
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Before proving it to your customers you have to prove the value of your product to your employees, partners and vendors, writes Rahul Joshi After working in a corporate job for close to 12 years I decided to chase the entrepreneur dream hoping to build on the ideas that I and my partners had in mind. It’s been around four years since then and I have been part of a few ventures spread across multiple domains. To briefly sum it up, it is by no means a walk in the park running your own business. You would be hard pressed to find an entrepreneur who says it was easy. For first timers who get into it after being in a job the very first thing that you realize is that there is no such thing as a regular monthly paycheck. However you do worry about ensuring your employees get theirs. A specific role and set of responsibilities become thing of the past. Meeting a customer to try and close a deal, help manage the operations at the office and sit with a developer to discuss a technical issue, all in a single work day is a norm. Finding time on the specific thing you love doing – be it coding, designing, strategizing, marketing or anything else, does not come easily. The pressure of shipping the product or completing the project is driven by how much it costs irrespective of whether you are self-funded or backed by investors. If you cannot afford the tools and resources for the technology you want to build on, one has to look for alternatives while ensuring it still comes out as a viable product. It’s a constant endeavor to maintain a balance between the three key pillars of your business, people, product and process. At the end of the day if you are not able to sell whatever it is you are producing and make up a case as to why they should choose you, one has reached a dead end. As a founder you have to believe in the potential of your product. Before proving it to your customers you have to prove it to your employees, partners and vendors. One of the things that make it tricky is dealing with external factors that are beyond your control. As they say timing is the most important factor that decides the success of your business. The need for your product can be market driven or introduced that you believe helps solve a problem. Although willingness to adapt your product and the availability of the supporting technology required for your product to work should be at its peak. Alternatively one also falls into a trap of assumptions. We came up with a mobile based service few years ago targeted for a specific group of professionals. It was obvious in our mind that the service would make it easier for them to get to the information they need. Turns out for a set of them the existing round about approach was not a big deal while for others they were not comfortable accessing this information in a digital form as they were used to the paper format. In this case the need was for us to identify and fill the trust deficit first before offering the technology based solution. Pricing your product be it software, a service or a retail item is another challenge that you have to deal with. I always thought how hard it could be? Determine how much it costs to build the product, add margin to it as your profit and you have the number. Just considering the cost part is an exercise in itself. Consider Fixed costs, recurring cost, indirect cost, travel and logistics, operations cost to start with a few. How much you value the customer’s business, potential to up sell, support and services desired by customer, volume involved, expected delivery timeline, resource availability on your end, available cash flow to invest up front are few of the other things to account for. Based on the domain you will have more but not less. Then there is competition, current economic environment, and your ability to sustain and scale that further influence your pricing. However not all is gloomy. Had it not been for getting into starting on your own I may have not started my own blog, may have not spoken at a few gatherings, got to travel, get to learn entirely new domains and dare to write, however imperfect it may be. Of course nothing prevented me from doing all this in past jobs as well but now these opportunities came to be more obvious to take up. Sometimes your vision of what is possible becomes limited by what you are exposed to. These ventures forced me to learn aspects like branding or accounting which were way out of my league. I have a new found respect and understanding for disciplines that I had not thought about before and how significant they are in contributing towards the success of any business. I always envied the freedom entrepreneurs enjoyed with their time. Although you can choose your own work hours taking the time out though is hard to come by. There is a certain threshold the business has to cross to free yourselves from the everyday operation and maybe afford a vacation. Until that happens you may have to see your friends post pictures from their outings while you are hunkered down to ensure you meet the basic need of food and paying your kids school fees. But that’s what you signed up for in the first place, didn’t you?The author, Rahul Joshi, is a start-up entrepreneur and founder of nectarfarm.com
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The Pune-based Hinjewadi Industries Association along with Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation set up a shuttle bus service called MetroZip “Daily 2,50,000 employees come to Hinjewadi to work and this number increases every year by 10-12 per cent,” says Anil Patwardhan, president of the Hinjewadi Industries Association, an industrial association for companies based out of Hinjewadi area of Pune. He adds that there has been no major infrastructural development, road or flyover, in the last five or six years. “There is only one three km long road that leads to the industrial park and it gets highly congested during office hours. Being stuck on that road for two hours every day has become a normal routine,” Patwardhan adds. In September last year, HIA along with Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) proposed a private transport system to ease the traffic woes of Hinjewadi and the area around it. They got facility management company Supreme Facility Management (SFM) on board to be their transport vendor and did a pilot study last year. They realised that 30 per cent of the employees were using four-wheelers, 35 per cent would use two-wheelers and the rest used company provided buses or other means. The idea was to discourage one-car-one-user practice and get these 65 per cent people using independent transport to start using shuttle service. So, in September 2014 they launched a shuttle bus service called MetroZip. They started with four popular routes in Pune with 13 buses. In the first week of the project 70 people registered on the online portal to use its service, shares Prashant Mohite, Chief Operating Officer of SFM. The popularity of this project grew by leaps and bounds and by December 2014, 700 started using its service daily, he informs. Along with that, SFM kept doing more surveys and realised the need for buses at several more routes. Due to the growing demand in February 2015 they started with 24 more routes with 38 buses. In fact, companies like Tata Technologies have shifted all their 650 employees to use MetroZip, shares Mohite. SFM is also trying to get WiFi and other facilities in the buses to make the commute more attractive and get more and more people to use this service. Presently, they have 48 routes all over the city of Pune with 74 buses and are catering to 3000 people per day. “From these 2,300 are those that have ditched their private vehicles for the bus,” shares Patwardhan, president of the HIA. “Due to MetroZip, more and more companies are applying to become the member of Hinjewadi Industries Association,” he quips.
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In the science fiction blockbuster, StarWars, the Dark Star is a loathed spacecraft that has the power to destroy planets. Its conquest of space is halted by a band of rebels who believe that the universe has to be freed from the wrath of dictatorship. Such is the scene that one witnesses, in the consumer internet world, that it is a battle royale for the mobile universe and advertising 'space'. The adversaries are Google and Facebook, on one side, versus a "federation" of smaller adtechnology companies. These wars often go unnoticed and need to be looked at from the context of opportuntiy. Publicis, the advertising giant, says that mobile ad spends will grow to $45 billion in 2016 from a mere $13.5 billion in 2013.Giant KillersThese adtech companies or startups represent the little guys, millions of app developers and media houses, who cannot afford to advertise on Google or Facebook. There is new hope seeding in the industry. It has taken root in the form of mobile app advertising; a 3.0 version powered by InMobi. Its platform called Miip is going to make publishers not just access advertising, but it also enables advertisers to get personal with their target audience, by engaging them with creative pop-ups, and will ultimately make them buy services. The platform is breath of fresh air to the already struggling adtech ecosystem.However, one must be aware that Google and Facebook have begun offering micro stores, of retailers, within their apps. The only problem is that neither Google nor Facebook have invested in tracking consumer habits and have no way of telling what happens when consumers move from one app to the other, which is InMobi's big bet on taking on these internet giants. The two years of hard work has taken shape in the form of the Death Star destroyer. The timing, of this platform, is a perfect media run for InMobi.It also believes that Miip can bring 1 billion consumers worldwide which will create a substantial business for InMobi, which is a direct $300 million business that can go in to its top line in 2 years. The company does not confirm this number, it obviously has a billion dollar business in its mind. But just when some of us wrote off adtechnology, as a business, it seems that there is a force out there, after all, that can stop the oligopoly of the mobile app economy.Unfortunately, for these startups, today Google and Facebook have, along with Twitter and LinkedIn, captured 80 percent of the mobile ad-space. There are a clutch of Indian startups like Adnear, InMobi, VServ and Vizury that believe personal and engaging advertisements are the future of the mobile app economy. Like all small companies they have made their fair share of mistakes and are now becoming data-led companies.Advertisers first wanted something that could measure consumer intent and there began the creation of adtechnology 2.0, which offered data analytics on user habits in apps. These platforms helped app developers understand their users and in the process offered personal banner ads to consumers. There was an intrinsic problem in this model for adtech companies. While there was a revelation that a data oriented approach could be the next best thing, it was not inducing customers to close transactions. Companies were placing ads on real time bidding platforms with intelligence and advertisers began forcing their hand and doubting the merits of the 2.0 technology.But what is the use of measuring when there is no incentive provided to transact. There was speculation that the adtechnology industry would eventually collapse or merge into one or two entities. This is precisely why InMobi's Miip is going to be a game changer for publishers and advertisers. The platform itself promises to create multiple business models beyond just impression-based payments. For retailers it will allow them to target users even when they move from one app to the other. Say a customer is browsing between a grocery shopping app and a movie app, the platform can help advertisers, in this case the movie and the grocery app, to make an offer to the customer for product gratification. This will change mobile app advertising forever, which means the Miip platform is open to anyone with an intention of capturing and converting an audience. People have called this phenomenon of tracking customers between apps deep linking. Flipkart and Snapdeal are working on a similar model to target consumers. Who knows they may make a splash with InMobi in the months to come.The question is will this 3.0 version of adtech companies work? BW Businessworld observes that this platform can be used by the likes of Walmart, Ford, General Motors, Fox News and the like. These are companies that have missed the consumer mobile internet revolution and are in serious need of engaging their consumers on the mobile. By the way Miip also reminds us of the "road runner" cartoon, courtesy Warner Brothers, where the bird, which outwits the wily Coyote every time he plans to trap it, announces its arrival and getaway with the famous call "meep-meep". But are these adtech companies fast enough to catch the Dark Star? Over the next 18 months we will either see adtechnology companies collapse or they will rise as the new Republic of the ad-space with several private equity and venture capital funds backing them to battle Google or a Facebook.
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Branding Tata Motors small car Nano as a cheapest car was a mistake and was one of the reasons for the model not taking off as expected, Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, said on Wednesday (15 July). He further clarified that people did not want to be associated with a cheap car. The former chairman of the Tata group said the small car was designed by people with an average age of 25-26 and was a success beyond expectations. The one-year delay because of the violent agitations against the company in West Bengal allowed competitors to spread wrong messages about the car, he added. Tata, who spent more than two decades at the helm of the iconic Tata group before hanging up his boots in 2012, has invested an undisclosed amount in Ampere, a Coimbatore-based electric vehicle start-up founded by a woman entrepreneur. Tata made the investment along with Ampere's existing investor, Forum Synergies. The start-up, founded by Hemalatha Annamalai, will use the funds to scale up operations and hire talent over two years. Ampere is the first automobile start-up investment for Tata, who conceived Nano, now one of the world's cheapest cars. Tata went on to add that e-commerce will change the face of merchandising and marketing in India. In the last one year, he has invested in a slew of consumer Internet companies such as Ola, Snapdeal, Paytm, and Xiaomi. Tata who is investing in start-ups said he was looking at those outfits that would help the common man. He also urged the entrepreneurs to be a long term player and build an institution than cashing out early. Some of the companies where Tata has invested in recent months include US-based high-altitude wind energy generator Altaeros Energies, e-commerce firm Snapdeal, online jewellery retailer BlueStone, online furniture retailer Urban Ladder, auto portal CarDekho.com and so on.
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